FINALIST FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Named a best book of 2019 by The New York Times, TIME, The Washington Post, NPR, Hudson Booksellers, The New York Public Library, The Dallas Morning News, and Library...

"Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage -- and lost his mother and all memory of her when he was a child -- but he is also gifted with a mysterious power. Hiram almost drowns when he crashes a carriage into a river, but is saved from the depths by a force he doesn't understand, a blue light that lifts him up and lands him a mile away. This strange brush with death forces a new urgency on Hiram's private rebellion. Spurred on by his improvised plantation...

"The conditions that allowed humans to live on Earth are incredibly fragile. Climate variability has at times created new niches that humans or their ancestors could potentially exploit, and challenges that at times have spurred innovation. But there's a relatively narrow envelope of climate variability within which human civilization remains viable, and our survival depends on conditions remaining within that range. In this book, renowned climate...

"A president who governed a divided country has much to teach us in a twenty-first-century moment of polarization and political crisis. Abraham Lincoln was president when implacable secessionists gave no quarter in a clash of visions inextricably bound up with money, power, race, identity, and faith. He was hated and hailed, excoriated and revered. In Lincoln we can see the possibilities of the presidency as well as its limitations. At once familiar...

"From historian and author of the popular daily newsletter LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN, a vital narrative that explains how America, once a beacon of democracy, now teeters on the brink of autocracy -- and how we can turn back. In the midst of the impeachment crisis of 2019, Heather Cox Richardson launched a daily Facebook essay providing the historical background of the daily torrent of news. The essays soon turned into a newsletter and, spread by word...

Nicolas de La Reynie, appointed by Louis XIV as the first police chief of Paris, pursues criminals through the labyrinthine neighborhoods of the city, unearths a tightly knit cabal of poisoners, witches, and renegade priests, and discovers that the distance between the quiet backstabbing world of the king's court and the criminal underground is disturbingly short. As he continues his investigations, La Reynie suspects that Louis's mistresses are involved...

"Oklahoma City was born from chaos. It was founded in a bizarre but momentous "Land Run" in 1889, when thousands of people lined up along the borders of Oklahoma Territory and rushed in at noon to stake their claims. Since then, it has been a city torn between the wild energy that drives its outsized ambitions, and the forces of order that seek sustainable progress. Nowhere was this dynamic better realized than in the drama of the Oklahoma City Thunder...